Executive Function Strategies Blog

As parents, we sometimes fall into the trap of believing our children are too young to be stressed. We are the adults with bills and obligations, after all! Well, it turns out that kids feel the pressure, too.

Final exams are fast approaching, and your child may be teeming with text anxiety. But there’s good news! For the most part, students are simply reactivating old learning that happened over the past school year. They’re not cramming in a ton of new facts into their heads. Rather, students are dusting off those memories they’ve filed away. This week, we’re offering up a couple of our tastiest tips for helping your child prepare for final exams in a way that builds confidence and helps scale back that irksome test anxiety. Share these with your favorite finals-taker.

First, we had “Fail” memes. These came in the form of pictures showing people, animals, and even inanimate objects failing at various things (see here). Then, the “Epic Fail” memes emerged. This caption was reserved for failures that were, well, really incredible on the fail scale (see here). Despite the fact that these memes encourage us to laugh at other people’s mistakes, I think they’ve actually done us some good: they’ve made making mistakes a thing. And once it’s a thing, we can get students to buy-in to the idea that we should spend more time talking about them (and eventually more time learning from them).

Test-taking can rattle even the smoothest student. Kids can feel like they’re heading into a vast unknown, hostile territory when they walk into the classroom and face that exam. Before your child gets all Ernest Shackleton on you, assure him or her that there are ways to tame that test anxiety and “show what you know”. This week, we consulted with two top learning experts and combined our superpowers to share with you our top 10 tips for overcoming test anxiety and preparing effectively for tests.